The present invention relates generally to the cleaning and sanitizing of public restrooms and lavoratories, and more particularly to an apparatus for efficiently and automatically cleansing said facilities.
Most commercial establishments provide for the convenience of their customers a restroom on the premises. This is particularly true in the case of service stations and eating establishments, wherein patrons may require the use of a restroom while utilizing other services of the particular business.
As with any restaurant facility, the aesthetics of the particular location are normally requisite to experiencing continued customer loyalty. A customer perceiving a filthy or apparently unsanitary washing facility will in many cases refrain from patronizing the establishment, thus causing a loss in business. Moreover, the cleanliness may affect the reputation of the establishment which is extremely difficult to change after the public has become aware of certain problems including cleanliness. This poor public acceptance of unsanitary and filthy restrooms has required owners of these establishments to implement cleaning schedules and techniques far more frequently than previously utilized.
Similarly, with service or repair stations, an unsanitary washroom facility may also have a direct effect on customer loyalty. Owners of these types of establishments have a continuous problem in keeping the washroom facilities in a clean and sanitary condition, primarily because of the frequent use and abuse of those facilities by transients as well as patrons. Moreover, in the case of service stations, where field representatives of the supplier continuously check the service stations' facilities, including their restroom, because those stations represent the tradename of the supplier, the owner of the service station is subject to severe scrutiny and possibly the loss of a license for maintaining an establishment that does not meet the requisite cleanliness standards of the parent company. Because it is impossible to monitor public use of the washroom facilities, a far more realistic approach is to provide a method and apparatus for rapidly cleaning these facilities on a more frequent basis than previously existed.
Due to the cost of manual labor to perform these types of activities, it becomes economically prohibitive to use maintenance personnel on a continuing basis for these stated purposes. Since many of these types of establishments, only have one or two employees, the problem of cleansing these facilities and the time required to perform the same may seriously affect the operation of the service station.
As shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,969,133, attempts have been made to provide restroom facilities which may be automatically cleaned. However, the expense and renovation required to implement these systems is in many cases impractical.